Cut snowflakes out of sheets of paper, and
you've got a nice winter art project. Grow a microscopic sheet of silicon crystal studded with snowflake-shaped holes, and you've got the thinnest sonic insulator ever designed, according to new research.
A team of physicists, writing in a paper published Jan. 18 in the journal Physical Review B, proposed the design for the nano-insulator. A flat, snowflake-studded slab, it would form an acoustic boundary — vibrations couldn't travel from one side to the other, but they could travel easily along its surface.
The basic principle is a lot like the curved walls of a luge course from the Winter Olympics: Sleds hit the boundaries at high speeds, but instead of crashing through them or bouncing away, they turn, following the new path. [The 18 Biggest Unsolved Mysteries in Physics]
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